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There is little to no doubt that as sales intelligence continues to emerge in the industry, it will become a crucial component in your job resume. As companies continue to sense the empowerment sales intelligence brings to their sales teams, experience with such platforms are beginning to become a standard for incoming sales professionals.
Here is an example of a job description for a Sales Associate Specialist:
How does experience with sales intelligence empower a sales professional?
It is best to answer this question by deriving some of the key duties from this job requirement and how sales intelligence can bring these duties to their fullest potential.
Identify key client prospect contacts: Sales intelligence platforms, such as InsideView, has the ability to build Watchlists - Watchlists help you track and monitor a list of companies for relevant business opportunities and challenges. By building a company list through sales intelligence, representatives have the ability to easily find companies within their targeted industry without spending hours of time researching.
Market to the key client prospect contacts: Using People Insights from InsideView, sales professionals now have the ability to approach the right people, with the right message, at the right time. With this tool, representatives no longer have to go digging through the Internet finding recent news about key prospects – People Watchlists deliver them daily notifications where it becomes easy to market.
Set up phone qualification calls for the territory Account Executive: The standard of cold calling and using data has begun its final bow out of the sales cycle. Of course it has its benefits of dialing 100+ people in one day and getting a couple of leads out of it. However, sales intelligence platforms brings real-time “people” information. It’s not just contact data (phone, email, address, etc.)…it’s contact information combined with social profiles (Twitter, Pandora, Facebook, etc.), University experiences, news articles, and more. When sales representatives make that initial call, they have everything they need to make a personal connection with the potential client.
Why are sales intelligence platforms becoming a job requirement?
Today we are in the midst of a social revolution. As more people across the globe become connected through the Internet, our methods of business are rapidly changing. Sales is at the tip of the spear with this new transformation of business. The issue is, not all sales representatives are utilizing the incredible resources online – primarily because researching takes time, eating up sales productivity.
More than 1/4 of sales teams use 50% or more of their time researching. (Aberdeen)
Sales professionals should no longer be expected to perform to their fullest capabilities spending half of their day researching potential prospects. Companies are starting to realize they can no longer afford to hire sales representatives who bring are not productive with research and given poor data quality. Sales intelligence platforms aggregate crucial pieces of material needed to empower sales teams in order to make effective sales calls. Companies, such as TriNet, are starting to realize that leveraging InsideView and sales intelligence cuts down time wasted researching and increases sales productivity.
“InsideView has helped us greatly improve our sales effectiveness. In doing so,we have been able to halve our research time, triple our call-to-opportunity ration, and generate more than 20% more opportunities.” Mark Stock, Sr.Director of Sales
There is little question sales intelligence is becoming a crucial tool for sales teams and professionals throughout multiple industries. Companies that require the experience of these platforms understand the power it gives to their sales professionals and the enormous benefits it has for their sales infrastructure.
From Ireland to the United Kingdom, sales people just gained more intelligence as InsideView announced the general availability of InsideView UK & Ireland edition. Working with eight of the leading integrators and resellers in the region we are already making an impact for over fifty businesses since we announced our move into Ireland and the UK.
InsideView gathers tens of thousands of information sources, filters what matters, and delivers the intelligence on UK and Ireland businesses directly into all of the market-leading CRM solutions. But what will the UK and Ireland Edition offer?
UK and Ireland Edition capabilities include:
- UK and Ireland territory maps for list building and prospecting
- Turnover displayed in GBP (£) or Euros (€)
- Individual profile setting for country-specific display of currency
- Expanded content coverage for companies, executives, public sector and government entities
What will the UK and Ireland Edition Offer?
With the UK and Ireland Edition of InsideView comes new Channel Partners. Together, InsideView and these partners are bringing actionable sales insights to teams of sales professionals in enterprises across the region. CGE Software, a specialist in Microsoft Dynamics CRM and a distributor of add-on CRM enhancements, highlighted the advantages that InsideView brings to its customers.
Content Sources – UK and Ireland Edition of InsideView
In response to the huge demand from companies selling to UK and Ireland businesses, InsideView is continuing its global expansion by bringing the industry’s leading sales intelligence solution to the UK and Ireland. We pull content from over 7,000 UK specific sources, the top 8 can be found here.
“InsideView is a powerful application that gives marketing and sales people great insights into the prospects and customers they target,” said Mike Spink, sales director of CGE Software Limited. “The most significant aspect of InsideView, is its ability to identify key people in millions of companies throughout the UK and the world — and deliver rich social profiles and connection paths to them. Of all the solutions I have seen, InsideView is the absolute best.”
Audra Oliver, head of marketing communications for King Worldwide and InsideView customer offered: “We are thrilled to have InsideView not only for the company information, but for the contact details, news, smart connection feature, and financials. We sell everything from investor relations services to high-level crisis management consulting and being able to get relevant company information at the click of a button is very valuable to us. Moreover the InsideView team is helpful, responsive, and made getting started virtually effortless. I would highly recommend it.”
InsideView is also teaming with business information providers and gathering data from all major news, social, and company sources that are specific to the U.K. and Ireland. This information improves the effectiveness of sales professionals that serve these markets where more than forty-five percent of the population is active in social media.
Umberto Milletti, CEO of InsideView, commented, “As more businesses understand that they can get an inside edge by leveraging social, news, company and professional information, they are turning to InsideView. The delivery of InsideView for the U.K. and Ireland is an indication that we can rapidly respond to the growing demand for sales intelligence around the globe.”
Selling to people has not changed dramatically over the past hundred years. You have a product or service, identify a pool of prospects and then discover how many of them you can help. Sure thats over simplified but when it boils down, those are some of the key components. What has changed a great idea over the past few years is not so much the overall process but the details of how to sell to people.
Most sales people do not have the opportunity to walk into the offices of their prospects, see the awards on the wall, photos on the desk and bag of golf clubs in the corner. These were the details a salesperson would use to break the ice, find some common interests and start a conversation. Without these insights, a salesperson is left to their own devices and would be left with being just another sales guy with a pitch. Get beyond the contact data of someones business card and get to know your prospect as the person and not just a contact in your CRM.
People buy from people. Business is done not necessarily with the company with the best product but more often with the salesperson who has found a connection with their prospect through a shared interest or a referral. In the post on the 8 ways to increase sales we outlined some best practices to follow.
More than 90 percent of executives never respond to cold-call sales or unsolicited emails.
Sales intelligence can identify connections between colleagues within an organization and prospects to reveal opportunities for meaningful sales contact. By arming sales professionals with actionable information from social sources, media outlets, company information and changes in business dynamics they are more likely to trigger sales. Sales professionals can quickly identify relevant connection points and build profitable, trusted relationships with prospects and customers that win more business and drive revenue.
‘It’s like watching an Ancestry.com commercial’
You’ve seen the commercial, a site that starts connecting the dots between you and your family and then builds a map of your entire family tree. It lets you see your connections to people you may never have known existed just by following the trail of connections through out history.
How can that apply to B2B sales?
- What if you could identify connection across multiple social graphs and include people you may not be connected to through a social network?
- How valuable would it be to have social streams from your prospects so you could see the updates, pictures and interactions they share?
- Would it be beneficial to be able to follow these people so anytime they were mentioned in the news or online you would get an alert so you could show you are listening?
Early adopters of People Insights like Network Hardware Resale are already seeing an impact in lead generation, opportunities and revenue.
“Social media mapping is my favorite feature. It’s just so cool. It’s almost like watching that Ancestry.com commercial- it’s like ‘I got a leaf!’ It’s when you find that connection that absolutely breaks you into an account; and once you’ve done that, your energy in looking for more of those connections goes WAY up. That becomes your best lead gen strategy ever. Now you want to have and create personal relationships with people through social media so that you can leverage those relationships.” - Michael Lodato, Senior Vice President, Sales and Marketing at NHR
Leveraging people insights isn’t just a good idea, it’s the only way you will increase your lead generation and create new opportunities in 2012. As explained in the post 5 ways sales intelligence can increase revenue, research shows that:
- 59% of the best in class companies have leveraged sales intelligence tools to identify or disqualify prospects with more accuracy
- 53% of companies have been able to identify existing customers that have upsell/cross sell opportunities
- 48% of companies have increased the quality of leads intheir pipelines
- 28% use technology to capture and share sales knowledge internally.
- 21% of companies reduce the amount of time doing sales research
For salespeople and sales leaders, understanding how to sell to people not contacts will be the difference between hitting or missing your number.
On January 26th, InsideView reached its 5,000th follower. Although some may not view this as an astronomical milestone in the metrics of social media, to us it is a huge accomplishment. We are not your typical company when it comes to social marketing, where the number of followers rule the measured success of our social engagement. Though more followers is always nice to have, we’ve held the position that its better to have 200 engaged members in our community than 10,000 people that don’t really care what we have to say and never interact with us. InsideView marks each follow as the establishment of a relationship geared towards benefiting all individuals throughout all cornerstone of business.
Congratulations to David Greenwald of PGi for being our 5000th follower! David has been using InsideView to make him more productive for years. It’s awesome to have customers like him making an impact by leveraging sales intelligence. PGi is a developer of video conferencing software that has a pretty slick interface. They were the first video conferencing platform I saw that integrated social networks into their product, and you all know how much of a fan I am when it comes to B2B use of social networks.
As a Global Sales Executive, David can really benefit following our tweets as we generally like to reach out to sales people around the world to better their skills and selling methods. Give him a follow @nexgentechsales. Thank you David!
We would like to take this opportunity for those who are reading this blog post and follow InsideView through any social media channel, to say thank you for all of the tweets and feedback you have given us over the years…You truly are our #1 fans.
There are two types of accounts, regular and strategic. Both are important and need to be given the time and resources to be successful but strategic accounts has a larger impact on the company and will get some extra attention. The important thing to remember and be disciplined about is that NOT every account is a strategic account. The most important consideration for what makes a strategic account is whether the account you are working with desires a lasting win-win relationship with your company.
Choosing a strategic account
Accounts that are identified to become strategic for the company must be working for a common goal that will bring growth to both organizations. You need to think of choosing these accounts as a business initiative versus a sales initiative. If both companies aren’t committed to the partnership then you shouldn’t move forward.
Things you should put in place for a strategic account.
- A cross functional team for communication
- Full executive endorsement
- A clear measurement of growth and success.
Working with Strategic accounts
When you have identified a strategic account, the real work starts. Working with and managing the process of gaining a strategic account takes time and resources that you may not be familiar with. Because this account will have a long tem impact on your company, special attention needs to be paid to the process to insure everything falls into place as needed.
- Account specific value proposition
- Find out where each company sees the business relationship today, one year and five years out.
- Create a joint action plan that holds both companies accountable for success
- Roadmaps and future plans must be shared
Both companies should have separate sets of metrics, one that can be communicated with internally and one that will be shared in conjunction with the strategic account.
Internal measurements
- Revenue
- ROI of the project
- Margins achieved
Joint metrics
- ROI from joint investments
- Completed goals in the action plan
- effectiveness of the communication channels
If the strategic account falls apart then it’s safe to say that it wasn’t the right company for your business to be working with. If either of you are not achieving mutually beneficial goals then the relationship needs to be re-evaluated, fixed or disolved. This will happen as you work with more strategic accounts but should be minimized as much and as often as possible. Every strategic account that falls apart should be systematically analyzed to see the causes and understand what and more importantly when these red flags could have been identified to make the needed adjustments in the future.
You all know and love that middle of the afternoon feeling when the coffee seems to wear off and all of life’s endeavors seem to focus on the goal of making it to 5p.m. (All future and present employers please disregard that last sentence) One fantastic way to get through this midday funk is to find a really inspiring quote. I often find that tweeting a great little quote will find more retweets and responses than any other tweets. I gathered 25 quotes in sales I find to be very powerful and motivating. I hope you can take at least one to heart because there are some great ones in this list.
Shoot us a tweet with your favorite sales quote! – @insideview
- “You don’t close a sale, you open a relationship if you want to build a long-term, successful enterprise.” ~Patricia Fripp
- “Whenever an individual or a business decides that success has been attained, progress stops.” ~Thomas J. Watson Jr
- “Everyone lives by selling something.” ~Robert Louis Stevenson
- “In order to succeed, we must first believe that we can.” ~Nikos Kazantzakis
- “How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.” ~Gilbert K. Chesterton
- “As you travel down life’s highway…whatever be your goal, you cannot sell a doughnut without acknowledging the hole.” ~Harold J. Shayler
- “Every sale has five basic obstacles: no need, no money, no hurry, no desire, no trust.” ~Zig Ziglar
- “And old Dave, he’d go up to his room, y’understand, put on his green velvet slippers – I’ll never forget – and pick up his phone and call the buyers, and without leaving his room, at the age of eighty-four, he made his living. And when I saw that, I realized that selling was the greatest career a man could want.” ~Arthur Miller (1915 – 2005), Death of a Salesman, 1949.
- “A mediocre idea that generates enthusiasm will go further than a great idea that inspires no one.” ~Mary Kay Ash
- “Catch a man a fish, and you can sell it to him. Teach a man to fish, and you ruin a wonderful business opportunity.” ~Karl Marx
- “On any given Monday I am one sale closer and one idea away from being a Millionaire.” ~Larry D. Turner
- “It’s just called ‘The Bible’ now. We dropped the word ‘Holy’ to give it a more mass-market appeal.” ~Editor, Hodder & Stoughton The Daily Telegraph, 30 Dec 1989.
- “It used to be that people needed products to survive. Now products need people to survive.” ~Nicholas Johnson
- “Most people think “selling” is the same as “talking”. But the most effective salespeople know that listening is the most important part of their job.” ~Roy Bartell
- “If you work just for money, you’ll never make it. But if you love what you are doing,and always put the customer first, success will be yours.” ~Ray Kroc
- “I have never worked a day in my life without selling. If I believe in something, I sell it, and I sell it hard.” ~Estée Lauder
- “A smart salesperson listens to emotions not facts.” ~Unknown
- “Everyone lives by selling something.” ~Robert Louis Stevenson
- “Victory is sweetest when you’ve known defeat.” ~Malcolm Forbes
- “Day by day, what you do is who you become.” ~Heraclitus
- “The wise man puts himself last and finds himself first.” ~Lao Tsu
- “Good ideas are common – what’s uncommon are people who will work hard enough to bring them about.” ~Ashleigh Brilliant
- “Falling down is how we grow. Staying down is how we die.” ~Brian Vaszily
- “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.” ~Albert Einstein
- “The difference between involvement and commitment is like ham and eggs. The chicken is involved; the pig is committed.” ~Martina Navratilova
Welcome to the year 2012! I hope the first couple of weeks is everything and more you could have hoped for in terms of sales and getting jazzed for a fresh start. I compiled a list of some blog posts I thought you all might find interesting. They outline a lot of really great best practices to get you up and running this year. For those who didn’t quite hit your marks last year, now might be a good time to start switching things up a bit. Spend the morning or afternoon reading these from some truly influential figures in sales.
- Personality Study of 1,000 Top Salespeople-Harvard Business Review - Heavy Hitter Sales Blog
- 12 Ways to Increase Sales – Inc.
- Being True To “You” – Paul Castain’s Playbook
- Optimism is a Selling Skill. Is Your Glass Half-Empty or Half Full? – Salesopedia
- How to Create an Enchanting Pitch #OfficeandGuyK – Guy Kawasaki
- 5 Leadership Tips for Sales Managers - Better Closer
- Seven Steps to Sales Transformation – Selling Power
- 8 Ways to Increase Sales – InsideView
- Want the Sales? Watch What You Say… – Joanne Black
- The Beauty of Imperfection – Jill Konrath
Shoot us at a tweet @insideview if you like our collection of blog posts!
How a few shifts in your sales process can have a huge impact on sales revenue.
I read a great article on Inc. yesterday on 12 ways to increase sales. The author Geoffrey James pointed out some of the most important things a salesperson or sales manager should do to increase sales in 2012. He hit the nail on the head when it comes to why these 12 ways to increase sales revenue will work, I want to tell you how to do it in 8.
1. Reduce the number of opportunities you pursue. It’s not a numbers game. By focusing your sales energy on fewer opportunities that have a higher chance of closing, you can give these customers more of your time to move the deal along. Leveraging traditional sales drivers and trigger events you are aware of, you will know which prospects have a much higher percentage of closing.
2. Increase the percentage of time you spend selling. There will always be admin work. As a salesperson you may not have the ability to hand your busy work off to others but there are ways that you can still increase your time selling. Most sales people on average spend 10hrs a week researching prospects. By leveraging technology and sales intelligence you can cut that amount of time in half and free up some of that precious time to be talking to prospects and customers and sell more.
3. Stop buying technology because it’s cool.
Stop spending your money on the next shiny object. Invest in technology that is actually going to help you sell. Focus on tools that will provide you
- Trigger events that effect your prospects and customers
- Valuable connections through multiple social networks and existing business relationships
- More personal insights that turn your CRM contacts into people you can relate to and add context around
- Highly targeted and intelligent prospect lists
4. Terminate weak engagements–politely but immediately.
Just as your company should have a solid lead qualification process to identify new opportunities you should spend the time to disqualify deals. A sales team should know what their ideal customer looks like and focus their energy on them. If a prospect doesn’t fit the mold, quit trying to force them into it.
5. Hone your lead generation effort.
Sales people need to understand the art of lead generation is shifting to an online world. Stop waiting for your phone to ring and look for the people you can help in real time. Social networks are a goldmine for the socially savvy sales rep. If you know what you are looking for, finding new opportunities with social media isn’t difficult. For example our sales team found this update on Twitter and jumped in.
What’s a good company database alternative to Hoovers? They don’t seem to want to sell me anything.
— Ross Mayfield (@Ross) January 10, 2012
These types of updates are something your sales team needs to be on the look out for. After 24 hours, Hoovers still has not replied to Ross’s update on Twitter. Listening is key. Leveraging connections and personal insights our sales team was able to connect and help Ross with his business needs.
6. Don’t focus on the gatekeepers.
Understand who the real decision makers are. Get to know them as people instead of the contact that makes decisions at XYZ company. Stay engaged with them during the sales cycle by engaging with them outside of the actual sale. Connect with prospects on social networks and try and help them with other questions they may have and add valuable insights on their industry.
7. Stay on top of your opportunities.
Build a watchlist on your opportunities so you can be fed news and other alerts to things that are changing within their company. Leveraging technology to keep your finger on the pulse of your opportunities will insure that nothing slips by you and you can even stay a step ahead during the sales process.
8. Outflank your competition.
I say it during my speaking engagements: Be different, Be better. Your prospects are getting 100+ emails a day and called as many times a week. This tactic may work some of the time but don’t do what your competitors are doing. Stand apart from them by leveraging your connections to get the introduction, connect with the decision makers on social networks to have more engaged conversations in a medium that they are already spending time in.
It works!
The assembly line has been a manufacturing process in the making for hundreds of years. However, it wasn’t until 1913 that it was perfected by the Ford Motor Company creating huge ramifications for the entire industry of automobiles and manufacturing. The concept of sales intelligence seems similar of creating such ramifications as it comes brings together a different concept of sales combined with extraordinary results.
An Industrial Revolution
Henry Ford’s assembly line changed all that the world knew about manufacturing in the early 20th century. Following this new form of production, companies all over the world began to develop similar models creating a small industrial revolution as automobiles and mass production began to change everything about business. The age of sales intelligence comes with dawn of a new industrial revolution steered by the power of a more social type of business. Sales intelligence is emerging as a result of the rise of social media. Humans are now linked to one another more than ever drastically changing the method of sales. Research is showing that the theory of 6 degrees of separation has been broken by social networks like Facebook.
Efficiency
Prior to Henry Ford’s assembly lines, the production of a single car took an astronomical amount of manpower, money and time. The average car cost $850 and took about 12.5 man-hours to make. Following the introduction of the assembly line, Model Ford T’s were being sold at $290 and only took 1 hour 33 minutes to make. Sales intelligence brings similar results of vastly improving efficiency. The average sales rep spends more than half of their day (4-5 work hours) researching customers and prospects. With real-time company and contact information paired with social media and smart agents, sales reps cut down their researching time of prospects and customer data by 50% – hence, giving them more time for prospecting and selling. (Understanding the Science of Sales Intelligence)
A Change in Tradition
The assembly line was a massive change in the tradition of craftsmanship and mastery. With very small and easy work done for less amount of workers, the traditional factory production system moved away from skilled workers and a larger workforce. Sales intelligence moves beyond traditional selling and moves into an age of social selling. As mentioned in the study the Science of Sales Intelligence, 92% of prospects don’t make a meeting when cold-called or emailed by a sales rep. With the power sales intelligence sales reps are able to move out of rhythm of blindly cold-calling and instead given the right people, the right message and the right time for selling.
The most notable element to derive from this analysis is how paramount both business solutions changed their industry. Sales intelligence will one day be a huge part of the sales industry as it will cease providing reps with contacts but the person behind the data.
It’s a new year and you have new sales goals but you can’t dismiss the facts gathered from 2011. 92% of executives you try to contact will not return your phone call. You should already know why, unless you have an amazing reason for them to listen to your message, they will delete it in the first 5 seconds. If you don’t give them a compelling reason to spend the time to call you back then you get forgotten about.
When calling on a prospect for the first time there are some simple steps you should take to make sure they return your call.
Leveraging existing connections
When doing your 2012 prospecting, make sure you focus on people you are connected to. Your customers (if they are happy) should be willing to make introductions or serve as references to other companies that you are trying to engage with. 84% of the people you try to connect with leveraging an existing connection will respond. If there is ever a more compelling reason to stop dialing for dollars, this would be it!
A Little Research Goes a Long Way
Do your homework on the person you are calling before you pick up the phone. Stop treating the names in your CRM as contacts and start thinking about them as people. If you dont have a prospect watchlist created for your prospects, do some research on them through social media. Are they active on networks like LinkedIn or Twitter? What are they saying. I’m sure there are some good pieces of information you can gather that will give you better personal insights on them.
Warm up every cold call.
Before calling, connect with the prospect on social media or by sending them the tried and true email. Send a short, personal letter saying something like, ‘I’d like to introduce myself. I’ve noticed your company has been actively growing the size of your widget factory and I’d like t know if I can help with anything’. Make sure you enclose something of value and indicating that you’ll be calling in a few days to gauge interest. Then, promptly follow up.
Build a conversation about the prospect first.
Building from that last two, you should know about your prospect as a persona and know about their specific business needs. Using the trigger events you monitor around their company and industry coupled with what you have gathered about the individual, structure your first conversation all around them. I’m not saying to avoid a sales pitch but make sure your pitch is completely focused to them and their company. Talk about what you have discovered and see if there is anything you are missing. Highlight how your product has helped companies like theirs recently and see if they are in a position to look at it in more detail and find additional value.
